On page SEO is a Search Engine Optimization techniques that must be established right inside your blog’s source code. Firstly lets know what is the difference between on page SEO and off page SEO.
On-page SEO is when you optimize your content and source code to be more friendly for search engines. On the other hand, Off-page SEO is not related directly to your blog, instead it’s an evaluation of the other websites or blogs that link to your blog, it’s also called link building.
Why on page SEO is so important for your blog ?
SEO is certainly, the most hard and important part when you launch a blog, especially if you want to earn money from it.
Mastering web development/design is great, but lets say that you built an award winning website or blog. Eventually, no one is going to visit your website if you haven’t built a strong SEO strategy.
Moreover, there is a lot of websites like yours, In order to survive in the online world, your blog must show up in the first page of Google, this is how you will get free unlimited organic traffic that can be converted easily to money.
Its true that link building (Off page SEO) is more important to enhance your Google rank. But On page is a must and it needs to be done effectively before getting into link building. Thus, developing an effective on page SEO strategy is the key success of every blogger.
Actually, the main problem is that it is not an exact science, meaning that when searching for on page SEO tips on the internet you may find a lot of confusing ideas.
Must follow On Page SEO for Bloggers
1) Content is the key
Writing great blog posts is absolutely the first step that you must be aware of. Trust me, useful and unique content will automatically boost your blog’s SEO. Besides, search engines love unique content.
Professional bloggers put a heavy emphasis on creating unique blog posts; Copying and pasting text from other website will kill your blog and you will be probably got banned from Google or any other search engines.
The article length is also an important factor, writing a post of 120 words isn’t a good idea at all, I recommend a length of 500-1000 words per blog post. This is useful for the reader as well as the search engine. Besides, writing all your posts with the same word count is not natural and search engines may think that you’re writing for them.
In addition, not only text must be unique, but also images need to be your own or you must have the license to use them freely in your blog. Remember, search engines are very smart and they can easily recognize that the pictures you use are not your own.
Some beginner bloggers have a bad habit of searching Google image and copying whatever they want without even reading the images license.
Also Read: Moving With Latest SEO Trends and techniques 2017
I highly recommend designing the images yourself using Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, Don’t worry, you are not required to create a high-quality logo or banner but generally, blogger images are simple with a lot of text inside them. Thus, this won’t be hard to do.
This will not only optimize your blogs SEO but your images will be ranked well when someone searches your blog’s niche in Google image.
2) Choose the right keywords
Keyword analysis is very important before writing any post. There are several tools that will make this process easier, among them I recommend Google Keyword Planner tool.
A perfect keyword must meet the following two principal criteria :
The competition on the keyword must be acceptable:
Also read: How to Scale Your Ecommerce Business Using SEO
For instance, if you want to optimize your blog for the keyword study abroad programs it will be extremely hard to rank first for this keyword. Let test it keyword on Google search:
As you can see in the picture above, search results about this keyword is: 6,34,00,000 this is not good news, for the simple reason that the websites you see in the first Google page have been around for years, obviously, they have a strong link building strategy and their on-page SEO is perfect. So whats the solution?
As a beginner blogger, try to start with long tail keywords that have low competition. In our example, we could use cheapest study abroad programs, the result is shown below:
Its clear that the competition is considerably lower than the first keyword (246.000 competitors). As a result, this keyword might be good as a start.
Additionally, there is another important factor; as you can see in the screenshot above, the first search result contains the target keyword in a secondary link, meaning that if you pick a domain name that contains the keyword it will probably be given the priority over this link.
People must be interested in this keyword:
We have chosen the keyword: cheapest study abroad programs, lets see how many people search for this keyword monthly using Google keyword planner screenshot
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Approximately 100 – 1K Avg. monthly searches. It seems great. If you succeed to rank first on Google for this keyword you will have this amount of traffic monthly.
Want a sophisticated tool with in-depth analysis and enhanced reporting? try Semrush.com. This is a powerful tool that will certainly save you hours of work searching your dream keyword/domain
3) Keyword placement for on page SEO
After picking the right keyword, lets see where to place it in your blog. In fact, this is a very important step, if you place your keyword everywhere in the blog without respecting certain standards, you will not optimize your blog and in some cases you will be detected as a spammer by search engines and you could be banned!
Following is the list of places where you should place the keyword in your blog:
- The domain name: Its a good idea to use a domain name that contains your main keyword. This is the entry point to your blog and it must be well optimized.
- The blog posts title: The title must be meaningful and natural.
- Headings (h1 -> h6): Headings are very important because search engines robots analyze them to figure out the subject of your post. But be careful, headings must be placed respectively, use one h1 heading (Mostly its the post title), one h2 heading and you can use multiple h3 heading.
- The main content: Use the keyword more than once in the main text, keep a keyword density of 2-3 %. On the other hand, don’t exaggerate! You may look like a spammer. Additionally, use bold or italic style; search engines will give priority to them to list your posts.
- Alt image description: This is a great place to put your keyword. Search engines use this attribute to index the image.
4) Add Meta data
This is where search engine extract details about your blog, its located in the <head> tag in the source code:
Also read: 10 Instagram Tips to Improve Your Overall SEO
- Title: a good title has to be chosen, it must be meaningful and not exceed 140 characters, and this is also a perfect place to put your main keyword.
- Description: the description is longer than the title, again use the principle keyword and describe your blog topic.
- Meta Keywords
There are other Meta tags, but they are not very important for SEO, you should focus on the list above.
5) Create SEO friendly URLs
Your posts URL must be SEO friendly, use the principal keyword of your post and try to analyze it with Google keyword planner.
6) Create privacy & policy, terms and conditions, about and contact pages
Search engines love trustworthy websites, you should prove that your blog is secure and follow legal conditions. This is a very common reason for rejection in Google AdSense. Besides, readers also don’t like to browse an insecure blog that may steal their privacy.
7) Link to your other posts
When writing a new post, try to link to your previous posts, this will improve considerably the on-page link building, Also, readers will probably visit your other blog pages. But, again don’t exaggerate; it will look unnatural, besides its not relevant at all for the reader.
8) Update your blog regularly
Your blog health depends highly on your update rate, if you write regularly, SEO will be improved considerably. This doesn’t mean that you have to write daily, but I recommend two posts per week.
9) Maintain a clear and simple design
Some bloggers think that putting sliders and animations everywhere in the blog is a good idea. This is totally wrong! First of all, because its very bad for the use experience (UX), also your readers will not focus on the content itself. Secondly, search engines don’t love animations in blogs especially flash animations, Be aware of this, flash animations are very bad for SEO.
In conclusion, keep the User Interface (UI) clear and easy to use. Don’t use multiple advertisement banners and popups, most readers hate these popups (and I’m one of them). Many bloggers use popups which can’t be closed unless you like their Facebook pages. This is really awful !
I’m not saying to not use them at all, It’s a double edge sword so, use them wisely. For instance, email subscription popups are very useful.
Conclusion
Every blogger must be aware of the importance of on page SEO, by making it the right way you will certainly boost your blogs rank and increase the traffic considerably.
If you have any suggestion, question or comment It would be very helpful for me to hear from you !
